Comments on: iRacing.com – A Lap at Watkins Glen

By: Tifose

Tifose — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:19:56 +0000

lol then i guess that’s my only reason haha you win buddy

By: navalhawkeye

navalhawkeye — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:14:15 +0000

No, you don’t have any reasons. Your only reason is the price, and you’ve worn that out.

By: ermax18

ermax18 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:33:24 +0000

Tifose, you have another bad comparison. iRacing would probably cost a one time fee of $20 with all current content if they could reach the masses that GT5 does. If you want to bash a game over price then bash GT5 becuase it has a much larger profit margin.

By: Tifose

Tifose — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:23:37 +0000

navalhawkeye maybe i do bash iRacing alot but i have a reason for doing so there price well always make people go wow and i understand why the put a price to everything, take a look at GT5 you walk in a store and pay 40 to 60 for it walk home play one dam good looking game that by far has the best car modeling and also laser-scanned tracks

By: ermax18

ermax18 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:53:01 +0000

The thing people keep forgetting is iRacing is a business. They can’t copy another businesses product (track/car) and then sell it for a profit. They have to do it legit with proper licensing and contracts. This isn’t cheap. As for the Eastern Creak comparison. Piddy had personal contact with the track that allowed access to the track for scanning. As far as I know his only cost was his time and the hardware. Also, Piddy isn’t selling his track so the track owner isn’t going to be concerned about licensing. This argument about pricing is getting so old. We all know by now that iRacing isn’t for everyone. I get sick of the iRacing fanboys that think they are special becuase they can afford the game. But I also get sick of people that continually bash the game simply becuase of the price. This is just biz. They aren’t going to lower the prices until they think it is in the best interest of the company. All the bitching on the forums isn’t going to drive prices down.

By: navalhawkeye

navalhawkeye — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:14:41 +0000

Lets see…it takes an 8 hour day to scan 1 mile of track.
-4 days to scan lets say Road America
-5 days worth of hotels, food, transportation
-Round trip flight for maybe 5 or 6 guys – that alone has to be close to 2k dollars (if not more maybe?)
-Then getting access to the track while nothing is going on…
-License fees (it was said that’s why Milwuakee was expensive)
-Putting it all together back in the office takes months

I can see where it’s close to 100k, can’t you?

So, Tifose, why do you resort to bashing the sim, when your only grounds for attack are the price? Why does the price alone make it a crap sim?

By: ral42

ral42 — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:25:41 +0000

Regarding the $100,000 per track, it was recently written in a print magazine by a guy who visited the iRacing office:
http://www.motorsportmagazine.co.uk/2008/11/12/racing-on-line-with-iracingcom/

Maybe he’s got his facts straight, maybe not. But I could imagine the $100k figure not being too far off.

By: tarnakman

tarnakman — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:48:49 +0000

ral42: im sorry to deceive you but it doesn’t cost 100.000$ to scan a single track.. especially if you already got the laser-scanning devices (such as iracing team development).
a laser-scanning device is very expensive; betwen 20k up to 40k. With it (and hundreds of hours) you can scan dozens of tracks.. then you have to do all the rest of the work, which im sure The Lonely knows pretty much about :)
so having fees of 25$ for a single track by pretexting it’s laser scanned when you already charges monthly fees is a complete rip off if you ask me and this is why this game will never join the mass of sim racers.
Sim racing is a very little market for gaming, to succeed to need to be affordable and open, i dont understand their strategy. I wish them goodluck tough cause it’s a quality product.. but i won’t drown my ass for hours driving around in a solstice.

By: The Lonely

The Lonely — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:25:32 +0000

It cost Piddy thousands of dollars out of his own back pocket, and that was substantially reduced from the normal price. So get your facts straight first.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:16:48 +0000

Exactly Yokelhama, beat me to it.

By: yokelhama

yokelhama — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:25:46 +0000

What about Eastern Creek for rfactor? That is laser-scanned and very accurate with bumps etc, I doubt that cost $100,000 for the track-maker to scan and it was FREE to download! So it can be done. If it was $25 for a trackpack (5 tracks etc) then that’d be more fair.

By: Tifose

Tifose — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:20:55 +0000

ral42 i understand what your saying and i know it’s not cheap at for them to make a track or car,at the end of the day the pick to walk this road and invest in this area there goal is to make a dam good racing sim if not the best but there not working and making all this cars and tracks for free you need to spend money to get back more money

like i say there Smart!!! and it’s paying off for them

i just have too much bills to pay things to buy and money to save for hard times!!!

By: the.cosmic.pope

the.cosmic.pope — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:42:23 +0000

I’d pay $25 for VLM Le Mans if they asked me.

By: ral42

ral42 — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:41:15 +0000

Here we go again with the usual whining about price. Nice to see some people around here who get it, but most still don’t seem to understand.

Yes, $25 for a track seems like a lot to pay, on top of a monthly subscription. But you don’t have to buy all of the content in iRacing to have a good time. You can pick and choose what you’re interested in. It’s like buying individual tracks instead of albums, or individual TV channels instead of a bundle containing mostly crap you don’t care about. Consumers have said over and over that they prefer the a la carte model for content, because they don’t want to subsidize development of content they don’t care about or don’t intend to consume.

This kind of content is expensive to develop, and iRacing is a business that needs to move towards profitability. Supposedly it costs them around $100,000 to scan a single track. I don’t know if that even includes all of the work that goes into making it sim-ready. As of mid-November, they supposedly have around 7500 subscribers. Let’s say they make an average of $15/month off each subscriber – that’s $112,500 per month, or $1.3M/year. That’s not even enough to cover payroll, let alone costs of scanning tracks, developing cars, licensing fees, server infrastructure and hosting, office space, all the costs incurred during the years before they opened for business, advertising, promotions, trade shows, etc etc etc.

Do you expect John Henry to just dump boatloads of cash into a business that is way cashflow negative indefinitely? That’s not how business works. Paying a one time purchase fee of $50 or $100 is not enough to sustain this kind of business. Neither is a $15/month subscription fee, unless they get a MUCH larger number of subscribers. But the market is small. They’re never going to see WoW-like 80M/month subscription revenue. The smaller the market, the higher the prices – if the company wants to stay in business.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:15:56 +0000

It just is a bit ridiculous imo. They make you pay per month, then charge you for pretty much anything?

I would not mind as much if it was not pay per month, but paying for both seems real crappy of them.

By: DRat

DRat — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:28:37 +0000

The exact duplication of the iRacing tracks’ geography and surface are absolutely great if you are trying to pre-test “on the cheap” at a track where you will soon be doing real racing. It’s also damn nice to drive on a sim track where the bumpiness is realistic instead of that maddening continuous fast bouncing you get at speed with some mods and tracks in GTR2, rFactor, GTL, etc.

All else said, though, as a part-time simracer I cannot commit to fixed racing schedules and do 95% of my racing offline as time allows. So, for me it is just not worth the fees. I’ve tried it out and think it is great, and for some it will not be too pricey, but for me it makes no sense time-wise or money-wise. Let’s all go back to GPL, where the racing was grittier and more realistic.

By: navalhawkeye

navalhawkeye — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:39:14 +0000

But they aren’t making that much per car, or track. And you do realize that the man that owns this whole thing owns the Boston Red Sox…and still races on it…he is not exactly looking to make a profit off of it. If he was, he wouldn’t be making a sim.

By: Tifose

Tifose — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:17:45 +0000

at the end of the day the do make money even if it’s $5 USD that’s alot when the have over 100 downloads a day

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:08:27 +0000

Also it costs them money aswell for the licenses for each car they create so wouldn’t be suprised if it will take them some time before they even turn a profit.

By: navalhawkeye

navalhawkeye — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:51:18 +0000

You know they probably don’t make much money in profit, right? It costs them THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of dollars to go scan each track.